[tex-live] newalg

Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard mpg at elzevir.fr
Sun Oct 5 14:39:33 CEST 2008


Robin Fairbairns a écrit :
>> Looks like another case of old docstrip defaults :(.

It is.

> there is no licence information on ctan (i though clea had found
> something, but i can see no sign of those things).

No explicit free licence statement means it's non-free in most
countries, anyway, so the "noinfo" tag from the catalogue is a non-free
category, right? So the question is whether it's non-free as
"other-nonfree" or as "noinfo"?

I think it's rather noinfo than other-nonfree indeed. Dosctrip default
headers cannot be regarded as a valid licence statement IMO. By the way,
if I didn't know you have already more than enough work, I would suggest
creating a "docstrip" tag for licence. Or anyway, I'd like to collect
(alone or with other's help) a list of packages with this problem and
present it to the LaTeX team once the list of verified problems gets big
enough.

Licence information in docstrip automatic headers is just plain
non-sense, cannot have any legal validity, and costs valuable
developer's time in futile investigations. I feel the LaTeX team
underestimates the problem, maybe they could change their mind if
presented with a reasonably big list of packages with this problem.

> i don't think it's
> reasonable for me to document what happens when you put things in tex
> live.
> 
I tend to agree, except it's not what happens when *we* put it in TeX
Live, but when *anyone* tries to put it in a usable form.

(Well, I'm really tempted to change my local copy of docstrip.tex (the
licence allows this) so that it says "this file, as well as its source
\filename.dtx and the compiled documentation, can be freely used,
distributed and/or modified under the terms of the LPPL v1.3 or higher":
then a lot of packages would "become" free when processed for TL, which
clearly shows how the whole thing is non-sense.)

Manuel.


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